Sunday, February 19, 2017 – Fake News
People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news. ~ A. J. Liebling
A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself. ~ Arthur Miller
Problems are the price of progress. Don’t bring me anything but trouble. Good news weakens me. ~ Charles F. Kettering
News is something someone wants suppressed. Everything else is just advertising. ~ Lord Northcliff
The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands. ~ Oscar Wilde
Journalism is organized gossip. ~ Edward Eggleston
Exaggeration of every kind is as essential to journalism as it is to dramatic art, for the object of journalism is to make events go as far as possible, ~ Arthur Schopenhauer
Too strong a media emphasis on death and violence can lead to despair. ~ Dali Lama
Dealing with the media is more difficult that bathing a leper. ~ Mother Teresa
The TV business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. ~ Hunter S. Thompson
In the hierarchy of predatory animals, journalists are the carrion eaters. ~ Jacques Welter
Being a reporter is as much a diagnosis as a job description. ~ Anna Quindlen
If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing. ~ Malcolm X
The idea that media is there to educate us, or to inform us, is ridiculous because that’s about tenth or eleventh on their list. ~ Abbie Hoffman
Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed. ~ Elbert Hubbard
The First Law of Journalism: to confirm existing prejudice, rather than contradict it. ~ Alexander Cockburn
I don’t so much mind that newspapers are dying. It’s watching them commit suicide that pisses me off. ~ Molly Ivins
Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. ~ Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer, 1990
Every good journalist is aware that his trade may one day go the way of phrenology – and, what’s more, the population will hardly protest the extinction. ~ David Remnick, The New Yorker, January 29, 1996
People may expect too much of journalism. Not only do they expect it to be entertaining, they expect it to be true. ~ Lewis H. Lapham
There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. ~ Oscar Wilde
If the newspapers of a country are filled with good news, the jails of that country will be filled with good people. ~ Daniel Moynihan
We journalists make it a point to know very little about an extremely wide variety of topics; this is how we stay objective. ~ Dave Barry
It was while making newspaper deliveries, trying to miss the bushes and hit the porch, that I first learned the importance of accuracy in journalism. ~ Charles Osgood
Remember, son, many a good story has been ruined by over-verification. ~ James Gordon Bennett
I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust. ~ Charles Baudelaire
Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization. ~ George Bernard Shaw
Ask how to live? Write, write, write anything; the world’s a fine believing world, write news. ~ Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Wit without Money (act II)
There is room in this great and growing city for a journal that is not only cheap but bright, not only bright but large, not only large but truly democratic – dedicated to the cause of the people rather than that of the purse potentates – devoted more to the news of the New than the Old World–that will expose all fraud and sham, fight all public evils and abuses–that will sever and battle for the people with earnest sincerity. ~ Joseph Pulitzer, May 1883, New York World
Great is journalism. Is not every able editor a ruler of the world, being the persuader of it? ~ Thomas Carlyle
In the real world, the right thing never happens in the right place and the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to make it appear that it has. ~ Mark Twain
You should always believe all you read in the newspapers, as this makes them more interesting. ~ Rose Macaulay
It’s amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper. ~ Jerry Seinfeld
The one function TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were. ~ David Brinkley
Nothing travels faster than light, with the possible exception of bad news, which follows its own rules. ~ Douglas Adams
The only gossip I’m interested in is things from the Weekly World News – “Woman’s bra bursts, 11 injured” – that kind of thing. ~ Johnny Depp
If you don’t change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news? ~ William Somerset Maugham
There is a huge difference between journalism and advertising. Journalism aspires to truth. Advertising is regulated for truth. I’ll put the accuracy of the average ad in this country up against the average news story any time. ~ Jeff I. Richards
I would not know how I am supposed to feel about many stories if not for the fact that the TV news personalities make sad faces for sad stories and happy faces for happy stories. ~ Dave Barry
Fake news executives are nicer than real news executives, though real news executives are funnier than fake news executives. They don’t know they’re being funny. ~ Stephen Colbert
To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. ~ Henry David Thoreau
News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read. And it’s only news until he’s read it. After that it’s dead. ~ Evelyn Waugh
Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray. ~ Milan Kundera
Literature is news that stays news. ~ Ezra Pound
The bad news is that fifty people died in a hotel fire; the good news is that we got exclusive footage. ~ Jessica Savitch
Business news is sexy. ~ Maria Bartiromo
The news appeals to the same jaded appetite that makes a child tire of a toy as soon as it becomes familiar and demand a new one in its place. ~ Christopher Lasch
News reports don’t change the world. Only facts change it, and those have already happened when we get the news. ~ Friedrich Durrenmatt
I do not like to get the news, because there has never been an era when so many things were going so right for so many of the wrong persons. ~ Ogden Nash
When you’re watching the news, how many days in a row can you watch that and feel good about yourself and the world? ~ Sandra Bernhard
I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers. ~ Mohandas Gandhi
Journalism largely consists in saying “Lord Jones is dead” to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive. ~ G. K. Chesterton
We can’t quite decide if the world is growing worse, or if the reporters are just working harder. ~ The Houghton Line, November 1965
News is history shot on the wing. ~ Gene Fowler, Skyline
Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock. ~ Ben Hecht
Journalism is the ability to meet the challenge of filling space. ~ Rebecca West
Just Above Sunset 